Thought for the Day (Sept 7)

Subject: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Peter T.
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 10:15 AM

Sept 7 -- Having spent some time in the past few days coaxing students into wading around in swamps, I began thinking about dirt. It is clear that many of the new students, particularly those from abroad, are wary of getting dirty for the hell of it. This may have something to do with adolescent fastidiousness (in spite of the mayhem of a teenage room). I remember hating washing dishes for years because I would get dirty, and then one day having the life-changing revelation that of course you can wash the dirt off afterwards! It does not stay. Since then I love washing dishes, getting really piggy dirty, and then cleaning up. But it took me years to get the point.
Some of the students are old hand wilderness campers; but most are suburban kids, and appear never to have had the chance to get disgustingly dirty in a pond somewhere.
Of course the other problem is that these students are in environmental studies, and one of the failures of environmentalism has been the association of environmental goodness with purity and cleanliness. This is some perverse version of the 1950's puritanism that infected (and cleansed whiter than white) suburbia, and has now turned people into bottled water drinkers. Nature is a big creepy crawly mess, and you either delight in it, or shrink from it. I can only hope that this bunch enjoyed the goop.
(Peter T.)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: MMario
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 10:50 AM

More people need to get out into swamps and "enjoy the goop" -

There was something to be said for a childhood with a swamp on one side of the property, a creek running along the back property line and a tidal marsh across the road.
Not that my mother appreciated it, especially after we spent an afternoon playing at "who can find the deepest mudhole" or "Who can get across the bog without falling in" (the answer was usually "no one"), but we ALL learned that you can get "filthy", and that it isn't necessarily a bad thing. And there was always the pleasure of cleaning up afterwards. If we were lucky, that meant a swim. If we weren't, it meant a high pressure hosing down by Dad.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: paddymac
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 11:23 AM

Amen! I grew up as a "swamp rat" in what was then a small town "out in the country" about thirty miles from Chicago. Nowadays, it's just another bedroom community without a vacant field between it and the city, and seemingly without an unpolluted swamp. My swamp time as a kid made me completely comfortable in the jungles of SE Asia, while "city kids" seemed generally panicked by the notion of dirt and creepy-crawly critters. Three cheers for goop and slime! Given a chance to let it out, I suspect that most of still have some of that "primordial slime" in our veins.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: KingBrilliant
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 11:35 AM

Until I was about 10 I seriously beleived that fingernails had a black rind. I remember being most concerned one day when I noticed my mum's nails had no rind. My daughter is similarly mucky, and my husband and I often argue over how much it matters (he thinks she'll get some nameless wormy disease thing).

Kris

PS. what pleasures of getting clean? :)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: JedMarum
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 11:39 AM

I also grew up in the swamps. I loved adventuring through the New England bogs, pond edge weeds, and swollen rivers. I always managed to come home too wet and muddy and had running battle with my mother over just how messy I was when I got home (you see I contended that if I had been wet with lovely swamp juice ... but dried off before I got home, technically speaking I wasn't wet ... Mom contended that I stunk just as bad; wet or dry).

Peter T. I am glad you are teaching a whole new generation of 'would be environmental guardians' the joys of beauties of the swamp (and its dirt). May your pant legs be forever muddy, and your students smell of swamp leaf liter!

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: JedMarum
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 11:40 AM

Oooops! Looks like I forgot to close my Italic HTML command. Sorry ...

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Neil Lowe
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 11:51 AM

.....one of my sons would get so dirty you could barely discern there was a little boy underneath the layer of filth....he's outgrown that somewhat, and I am a little remorseful....veterans of the parent trenches tell me it only gets worse. I believe them.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Allan C.
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 12:35 PM

I can hardly imagine having a complete childhood without an opportunity to muck around in a creek or at the edge of some other body of water. I spent hours upon hours catching crayfish, (I was nearly grown before I ever heard them called, "crawfish".) frogs, pollywogs, (tadpoles) turtles, and snakes. My friends and I also captured and/or studied a number of other critters such as water spiders, hellgrammites, mosquito larvae, dragon flies and so many others. It was hands-on biology/ecology or whatever. For us it was just fun. We had neighborhood contests to see how many garter snakes we could capture in an afternoon. My personal record was twenty-two. (They were all released after the official count.)

We had our local legends such as the one about the huge snapping turtle that ate an entire dog in one gulp. We also had the occasional visitor from some other place who swore that every snake was either a copperhead or a moccasin. We would just laugh because we knew all of the snakes around there on virtually a first name basis. There were no poisonous snakes for eighty miles in any direction.

When it came time to actually study biology in school, I felt like I was years ahead of many of my classmates. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a place where a love of the world of nature had a chance to develop. And I am especially appreciative of a mother who never gave me a hard time about getting wet or muddy. To this day I can't get near a river bank, creek bed or seashore without wading in and digging around to see what I can find.

If you are reading this and have never ventured to the banks of a creek and turned over a flat rock or two - either in the water or near it, then I urge you to make plans to do so and take the kids along. I suspect they may teach you something.

Let's get MESSY!!

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 01:58 PM

My brother used to catch pollywogs and salamanders. I remember being fascinated by them. We always went cmaping by a creek (crick) and would have hours and hours of fun wading in and out of the shallows, scaring up frogs, trout, wtare spiders and other creepy crawlies. I even used to pretend I was a pioneer woman and wash my doll's clothes in the little irrigation ditches in Colorado.

We lived next door to a swamp in CT and had all manner of great critters, including incredible basso profundo bull frogs as well as peepers. we were so take by them, we crept down to the ppond one night with a boom box on an extension cord and made a recording for my mother who lived in dry old Wyoming with no peepers!

We found a turtle, one day, driving near Mystic Village in CT. She was as big as my steering wheel and, we thought, about to get run over. So we picked her up, put her in the back of the car, where she laid several golf ball-like eggs (without the dimples), took her home and called the nature center. Only then did we learn she was a snapping turtle, strong enough to bite our fingers in two and that we should put her back where we found her to finish laying her eggs in the sandy edges of the road where they usually lay them. That explained why we were always seeing runover baby turtles, duh!

The only time I was a little put out at being so close to a swamp was when I sat down on the toilet one day and noticed a little green frog crawling up the wall beside me.

My kids were thrilled when we moved from WY to the Bershires of MA. Their principal had a cranberry bog and every fall would take the kids tramping across it for a field trip. They were in heaven.

Here's to getting wet and muddy!

kat

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: catspaw49
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 02:20 PM

So we're back to the frog in the crapper again, huh Kat? Oh well...........

Spaw

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Jeri
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 02:29 PM

Getting covered with "stuff" makes you really enjoy getting cleaned up. In back of the house where I grew up was a creek, and I caught critters and played with the mud from the bottom. I played in the dirt and got covered with it, climbed trees and got covered with pine pitch, rolled down hills and got covered with grass and leaves and sometimes more unpleasant substances.

Kat, I was never a pioneer woman, but I had my best friend convinced that I'd grown up in the jungle with Tarzan and had later been adopted. (She also thought cartoons were real.)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 04:59 PM

Jeri, are all your friends that gullible? And, how do you explain the four fiddles to them?*BG* I think my grandmother, who was a pioneer, probably wouldn't have thought much of my washing things in the ditch.

Ah...who remembers the great smell of dirt, horse hair, horse sweat, and the grime beneath your fingernails from grooming your horse after a long ride? So much dust! Then using my dad's Lava soap to wash it all off!

'Spaw...I just had ta mention the Kermit, in case a few newbies had missed it. 'Course that was nothing compared to the ones Rog frequently found in the shower in Venezuela; had the touch of death. You can bet he didn't pick them! Nope just finished his shower and left them to it!

kat

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Jeri
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 05:14 PM

Kat, that particular friend wasn't all that bright. I don't know whether she had a real lack of intelligence, or whether the environment she was in made her that way. Her parents were the type that didn't want to know she was around. If they noticed her, they usually yelled. As a result, she spent all the time she could at my house. I was just playing when I made up the story, and eventually felt so bad she believed it that I told her the truth.

Anybody remember Boraxo? With the little mule team on the tin? That stuff worked great, and didn't taste too bad, either.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: katlaughing
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 05:25 PM

Jeri, that's sad. Have you kept in touch at all? My brother used to tell me, when I was about 3-5 yrs. old, that he'd grown up with wild animals on the little islands of the N. Platte, here in Casper. (We were all enamoured with the Jungle Book.) I believed him for the longest time; was always looking for big ole lions!

kat

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 7)
From: Jeri
Date: 07 Sep 99 - 05:53 PM

No, I don't have a clue what happened to her. She started hanging around with a bunch of tough kids when she got to high school and before she dropped out. I know she got busted and became pregnant later. It's sad - there seemed to be no love or compassion in her family at all, and that's what she learned.